David hume on miracles essay

From 1763 to 1765, Hume was invited to attend Lord Hertford in Paris, where he became secretary to the British embassy. [41] While there he met with Isaac de Pinto [42] and fell out with Jean-Jacques Rousseau . Hume was sufficiently worried about the damage to his reputation from the quarrel with Rousseau (who is generally believed to have suffered from paranoia ) to have authored an account of the dispute, which he titled, appropriately enough "A concise and genuine account of the dispute between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau." [43] In 1765, he served as British Chargé d'affaires , writing "despatches to the British Secretary of State". [44] He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh ... to correct and qualify so much lusciousness". [45] In 1766, upon returning to Britain, Hume encouraged Lord Hertford to invest in a number of slave plantations, acquired by George Colebrooke and others in the Windward Islands . [46] In 1767, Hume was appointed Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. Here he wrote that he was given "all the secrets of the Kingdom". In 1769 he returned to James' Court in Edinburgh, and then lived, from 1771 until his death in 1776, at the southwest corner of St. Andrew's Square in Edinburgh's New Town , at what is now 21 Saint David Street. [47] A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence, suggests the street may have been named after Hume. [48]

As indicated in the above chart, our more complex ideas of the imagination are further divided between two categories. Some imaginative ideas represent flights of the fancy, such as the idea of a golden mountain; however, other imaginative ideas represent solid reasoning, such as predicting the trajectory of a thrown ball. The fanciful ideas are derived from the faculty of the fancy , and are the source of fantasies, superstitions, and bad philosophy. By contrast, sound ideas are derived from the faculty of the understanding— or reason—and are of two types: (1) involving relations of ideas; or (2) involving matters of fact. A relation of ideas (or relation between ideas) is a mathematical relation that is “discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe,” such as the mathematical statement “the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the two sides” ( Enquiry , 4). By contrast, a matter of fact, for Hume, is any object or circumstance which has physical existence, such as “the sun will rise tomorrow”. This split between relations of ideas and matters of fact is commonly called “Hume’s Fork”, and Hume himself uses it as a radical tool for distinguishing between well-founded ideas of the understanding, and unfounded ideas of the fancy. He dramatically makes this point at the conclusion of his Enquiry :

Atheists can treat these premises as axioms, . accepted as true without proof,
but they are theorems for Christians since they follow from the
propositions of Scripture . Indeed, atheists can’t prove that the universe
is orderly, because the proofs would have to suppose the order they are trying to
prove. Similarly, they can't prove that their thoughts are rational because the
proofs would have to assume this very rationality. Yet evolution would select only
for survival advantage, not rationality.

A brutal, destructive conflict in Germany between 1618 and 1648 . The
Thirty Years’ War began when Bohemian Protestants revolted out of
a refusal to be ruled by a Catholic king. The battle would eventually
spread throughout Germany and involve many other countries on both
sides, resulting in the death of nearly a third of the German population
and unfathomable destruction. Enlightenment thinkers such as John
Comenius and Hugo Grotius reacted against the war
with treatises about education, international relations, and the nature
of war itself.

When one event continually follows after another, most people think that a connection between the two events makes the second event follow from the first. Hume challenged this belief in the first book of his Treatise on Human Nature and later in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding . He noted that although we do perceive the one event following the other, we do not perceive any necessary connection between the two. And according to his skeptical epistemology, we can only trust the knowledge that we acquire from our perceptions. Hume asserted that our idea of causation consists of little more than the expectation for certain events to result after other events that precede them:

David hume on miracles essay

A brutal, destructive conflict in Germany between 1618 and 1648 . The
Thirty Years’ War began when Bohemian Protestants revolted out of
a refusal to be ruled by a Catholic king. The battle would eventually
spread throughout Germany and involve many other countries on both
sides, resulting in the death of nearly a third of the German population
and unfathomable destruction. Enlightenment thinkers such as John
Comenius and Hugo Grotius reacted against the war
with treatises about education, international relations, and the nature
of war itself.